Science Fiction Studies

#95 = Volume 32, Part 1 = March 2005

Jules Verne Roundtable

Early in the summer of 2004, during the initial
stages of our planning for this special issue, I sent out a letter to all SFS
consultants and several other scholars who had an interest in Jules Verne. In
this letter, I invited them to participate in a roundtable discussion by writing
a short response (250 words or less) to the question: "What is Jules Verne’s
relevance to the twenty-first century?" The following comments are the result of
this query. I offer my grateful thanks to all those who participated.—ABE

I think of Jules Verne as an essential stage in the
evolution of science fiction from the fantastic voyage, fantasy satire, and
utopia of earlier literature. Although he was addicted to a version of the
fantastic voyage (voyages extraordinaires), he mixed it with his
fascination with new technology to create a believable adventure into unknown
lands. It is the believability of his submarines, cannons, and powered balloons
that created an appetite for the bolder extrapolations of his successors, as
well as the idea-centered speculations pioneered by H.G. Wells. But it was Jules
Verne who jump-started the genre, proving that this visionary literature had a
world-wide readership and the potential to support a variety of writers, and it
is difficult to imagine what science fiction would have been without him. One
example of his significance is that his novels are the first sf works translated
into countries just beginning their industrial transformations, such as China
and India. A second is that his work, along with that of Wells and Poe, was
featured on the cover of Amazing Stories for its first nine issues; these
were the writers whom Gernsback pointed out as the examples of what he proposed
to publish. A third is the inspiration he provided for a generation of inventors
and explorers such as Igor Sikorsky, Simon Lake, Norman Casteret, and Admiral
Byrd. In The Road to Science Fiction, I called Verne "the indispensable
Frenchman." He still seems indispensable.—James
Gunn, University of Kansas

The many stories of Jules Verne are proof positive
that the Zeitgeist is the true begetter of science fiction. His most
memorable characters—Nemo, Robur, Phileas Fogg, Barbicane—are culture heroes
from the first age of progress. Promethean figures all of them: solitary
achievers in a tomorrow’s world where the dearest ambitions of the nineteenth
century are shown to have been realized.

His heroes contribute in extraordinary ways to the
splendid record of achievement that runs from James Watt and Bessemer to Edison,
Westinghouse, and Pullman. In 1869, by a prodigious act of engineering, de
Lesseps had transformed terrestrial communications when the Suez Canal was
opened; and one year later Verne continued the history of engineering with a
look-ahead to the next advance in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.
Far away, on a desert island in the Pacific, Captain Nemo "established his
dockyard, and there a submarine vessel was constructed from his design. By
methods which will at some future date be revealed he had rendered subservient
the illimitable forces of electricity, which, extracted from inexhaustible
sources, was employed for all the requirements of his floating equipage."

Nemo, Robur, Barbicane, and Cyrus Smith remain
forever embedded in the last age of innocence. Time and many technological
advances have turned them into museum pieces of bygone ideas and long vanished
hopes—elements in the Victorian dialogue between today and tomorrow. The
self-confident antici-pations of the Verne stories have given place to tales of
despair and destruction. The Lord of the Flies had foreseen "that men would be
made so overwhelmingly bumptious by the miracles of their own technology that
they would soon lose all sense of reality."—I.F.
Clarke, Milton under Wychwood, Oxon, UK

Verne still matters because he was a master
storyteller whose tales challenge our moral imagination while also feeding our
insatiable hunger for vicarious adventure. Unlike Aronnax, once we have boarded
the Nautilus we cannot escape. Nemo’s submarine forever prowls in the
depths of our minds and sometimes surfaces in ways as unexpected and
disconcerting as it was to Verne’s contemporaries. It is at once an oddment of
early technological fantasy receding into history books, and also an enduring
and all too appealing symbol of utopian longing to flee the mundane world ashore
which so often puts the far more marvelous real technology of the twenty-first
century to uses that are infuriatingly trivial or unjust. Who that has ever
enjoyed Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea does not sometimes long to
sail like Nemo to lost Atlantis, appreciate art or music as he does in unsocial
solitude, and torpedo as viciously as he does some ship of fools? But to imagine
Nemo as more Robin Hood than Bin Laden, even though right, may tempt us to a
dangerous path. So too for many of Verne’s other voyagers. To adventure
vicariously with them and their alluring machines is to suspend belief in our
own moral certitudes no less than those of the nineteenth century which Verne’s
novels so often loudly endorse while quietly subverting. He remains worth
reading because to do so properly is to pass judgment, not only on Nemo, Aronnax,
Robur, and the rest, but on ourselves.—Paul Alkon, University of Southern
California

Jules Verne was born in 1828—that is, three years
before Michael Faraday demonstrated the principle of induction, the discovery
that made possible the invention of the electric generator—and he died in 1905,
a decade after the large-scale distribution of electric energy was inaugurated
when the water flowing over Niagara Falls was diverted to power two
5000-horsepower generators. Or, to put it another way,Verne was born three years
after the first public railway line opened (England’s Stockton and Darlington
Railway), and he died during the year that saw the completion of the first
continuous route of the great Trans-Siberian Railway, which stretched some ten
thousand kilometers across the vastness of Russia.

A pair of dates, then, establishes that Verne’s
lifetime encompassed the most consequential era of technological advance since
the origins of civilization itself in the agricultural revolution more than ten
millennia ago. His novels remain of enduring interest in the twenty-first
century because of the practically unparalleled sensitivity with which he
responded to technological change. What is crucial here is less the
technical details—the submarine of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea,
the space cannon of From the Earth to the Moon, the hollow planet of
Journey to the Center of the Earth—than the general understanding that
science and technology were remaking everyday life in radical ways. But must not
this insight have been obvious to any major novelist of the nineteenth century?
You might guess so, yet the literary record proves otherwise: think of Jane
Austen, think of Dickens, think even of Flaubert. Comprehension of the impact of
scientific technology on human feeling was Verne’s special gift, and he will be
an indispensable guide and inspiration as long as new technology continues to
reshape our lives.—Carl Freedman, Louisiana State University

One aspect by which Verne remains relevant to our
time is in our loss of illusions, at the end of the twentieth century and the
beginning of the twenty-first, about science and our increased awareness about
how science and its miracles may be used for selfish ends. This is especially
visible in Verne’s less familiar works. His most popular novels are naively
optimistic, propagating the model of the heroic engineer (Nemo, Cyrus Smith,
Barbicane) or taking the form of a bildungsroman (A Captain of 15
or A Two Years’ Vacation). Verne’s "minor" works, in contrast, are often
very different. Consider, for example, Propeller Island, which portrays
the destruction of the technological marvel of its title—depicted as the epitome
of progress—by feuding billionaire American capitalists. Or look closely at how,
in Topsy-Turvy, Verne brings back the protagonists of the Baltimore Gun
Club and then subverts those qualities that made them the famous heroes of
From the Earth to the Moon. Barbicane and his friends represent the
financial interests of the stockholders of "The North Polar Practical
Association" and have no moral qualms about wreaking havoc upon the human
populations of the world by altering the axis of Earth in order to gain access
to rich coal deposits. This giving priority to the interests of stockholders
over the interests of people seems to me very characteristic of early
twenty-first century capitalism. In these novels, Verne shows himself to be an
author of sociological speculation, a trait rarely attributed to him.—Roger
Bozzetto, Université d’Aix-Marseille I

Real scholarly research about Jules Verne only
began in the last thirty or so years of the twentieth century. Some astonishing
discoveries have been made: for example, that the first and most important Verne
biography (by Allotte de la Fuÿe, 1928) was full of errors, omissions, and
outright lies. She misrepresented events in Verne’s life, modified letters, and
invented others in trying to portray Verne as a good French bourgeois—well
within the political and religious mainstream—with just a touch of marginalism
which might be expected in an artist. This flawed biography is still used today
by many journalists and pseudo-specialists in promoting the traditional image of
Verne. An even more surprising discovery was that those Verne novels published
after his death by Hetzel fils were modified and sometimes completely
rewritten by Michel Verne, Jules’s son.

After these discoveries, the original Verne
versions of the posthumous novels were published, the correspondence between
Verne and his publisher Hetzel was published, and the letters between the author
and Hetzel’s son are to be published in a year or two. Today, we have an almost
complete and true corpus available of all of Verne’s works, more accurate
biographies, and a host of new and better translations, not only in English but
in the other principal languages as well.

All these elements should help to make Jules Verne
an even more recognized novelist in the twenty-first century, one whose life and
works will be studied by future generations of scholars.—Jean-Michel
Margot, President of the North American Jules Verne Society

That Jules Verne is of relevance for the
twenty-first century seems undoubtedly true in view of the many new editions,
both of old favorites and lesser known works, appearing in various countries. In
Germany, some works are appearing now in modern translations and with scholarly
commentaries, and other works that had been available only in the form that
Verne’s son Michel gave them are now being prepared for the first time in their
original form. While I have never studied Verne’s works in detail, his main
relevance for our time seems to be the boundless curiosity that his characters
show about the world; they are always eager to explore and to learn new things,
which is in marked contrast to the jadedness of much modern science fiction, in
which the most fantastic things are taken for granted and used most often only
for killing. And Verne managed to convey the idea that knowledge, and the
striving after knowledge, can have and does have an aesthetic quality, and that
large amounts of information can be a thing of beauty. While humankind has
learned a good deal, it should not be forgotten that the realm of things
not-yet-known is infinitely larger and that, before the vast cosmos, we are
still like little children who have just embarked on the path to knowledge;
achieving wisdom is quite another thing.—Franz
Rottensteiner, Vienna, Austria

For a century after the 1863 publication of Five
Weeks in a Balloon, Jules Verne served as the spiritual father of pimply
would-be engineers who sought, not to reform the world, but to escape via
technological transcendence from countries with too much history and not enough
geography. Verne’s paradigmatic acolyte was Hugo Gernsback, precocious
electrifier of a convent in Luxembourg before his inevitable translation to the
vaster transatlantic realm of Edison, le sorcier de Menlo Park. With his
fellow émigré Frank R. Paul, equally steeped in the great Frenchman’s dreamy
literalism, Gernsback went on to invent modern sci-fi, American as apple pie. As
for today’s spotty wannabe software designers with their twitching joysticks and
nanosecond attention spans, it seems hardly possible that they or their
descendants will ever have time or patience for Verne, the epic encyclopédiste of
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Most of Verne seems destined to
remain the province of the academic sf specialist, though the oeuvre will always
be a rich resource for the adaptor with a postmodern thing for retro futurology.
Indeed, he who takes up Verne anew today is likely to be a tired middle-aged
homme moyen sensuel seeking an escape hatch from the Matrix into a simpler
age of steam and rivets. To him we can reveal that when in such novels as
Survivors of the Chancellor or Michael Strogoff Hetzel allowed the
darker side its due, Verne was a superb adventure writer.—Nicholas
Ruddick, University of Regina

A century ago, in Le Voyage dans la lune
(1902) and its sequel/remake Voyage à
travers l’impossible (1905), Georges Méliès
captured (in what now seems like miniature, but then was epic and spectacular)
two key elements of Verne: production and circumnavigation. A century later, in
Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion (2004), Jack Shaftoe goes around the
world in rather more than eighty days; as he journeys across Hindoostan, he has
reason to stop on Diu Island, off the coast of Gujarat, and distil the
phosphorus out of countless gallons of piss—a procedure described in detail and
at length. In China Miéville’s Iron Council (2004), circumnavigation
becomes revolution as a transcontinental railroad still under construction is
seized by proletarians teetering on the brink of class consciousness; building
the railroad with tracks taken from behind the train, which it then runs over in
an ongoing cycle, they flee New Crobuzon, only to return years later, having
traversed the continent (but unlike Phileas Fogg’s train, the Iron Council’s
does not leap a gap—instead, it endlessly produces a gap, the moment of
revolutionary transformation). The protagonists of The Confusion and
Iron Council map their worlds, sending and bringing back information. They
produce. They return.

Regardless of any particular indebtedness to Verne that Stephenson and Miéville
might have, both show us the importance of Verne as the initiator of a
literature that is always already about capitalism-modernity. Verne’s obsessive
focus on the current moment, his general refusal to extrapolate futures,
repeatedly captures a bourgeois epoch (described in the opening pages of The
Communist Manifesto) of constantly revolutionized production in which social
relations are constantly on the verge of transformation. For Verne to go beyond
the moment would have required a less conservative investment in progress, but
he nonetheless recognized, partially and inconsistently, that the transformation
of the world after the image of the bourgeoisie carried tremendous costs, not
least for those being transformed. This too is evident in some of the best sf/fantasy
being produced today: not just by Stephenson and Miéville (who also share
something of Verne’s encyclopedic totalitarianism), but by Gwyneth Jones, Kim
Stanley Robinson, M. John Harrison, and others, including William Gibson and
Bruce Sterling, whose (post)cyberpunk has spent twenty years learning this
lesson.—Mark Bould, University of the West
of England, Bristol